The MagazineA Strange Eventful History  Photo Credit: Corbis The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families For 24 years, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving conducted one of the most beloved and successful partnerships the theater has ever known—an impressive run by any measure, though it was too long for Bernard Shaw, who felt Terry had wasted her talent by working with an actor who sentimentalized Shakespeare and preferred melodrama to Ibsen. Considering “the originality and modernity” of Terry’s talent, Shaw was certain “that it would have been better for us 25 years ago to have tied [Irving] up in a sack with every existing copy of the works of Shakespeare, and dropped him into the crater of the nearest volcano.” As Michael Holroyd shows in this joint biography of the Irving and Terry families, Shaw objected not only to the actor-manager in Irving: He also resented the man. Irving never mounted any of Shaw’s plays, and Shaw, despite reams of witty love letters, never budged Terry from her devotion to the aloof, imperious, driven man whom his colleagues called “the Guv’nor.” To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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